Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center

Advancing the state-of-the-art in high-performance computing, communications and data analytics.

New Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center System from Hewlett-Packard Supports Research in Pennsylvania

At DISCOVER 09, an Open House on January 29, PSC will demonstrate research advantages of high-performance computing.

PITTSBURGH, January 13, 2009 - Through an arrangement with Hewlett-Packard (HP), the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) has installed and made available to researchers a 64-core, HP BladeSystem c3000. This new PSC system, named Warhol, is provided exclusively to academic researchers in Pennsylvania, as well as private sector and government researchers.

"At PSC we have collaborated with Hewlett-Packard for many years," said J. Ray Scott, PSC director of systems and operations, "in development of innovative software and hardware to support scientific research. In making this new system available to PSC, they acknowledge this mutually productive partnership."

Warhol features eight nodes, each housing two Intel Xeon E5440 quad-core processors, for a total of 64 cores. The eight cores on a node share eight gigabytes of memory. The nodes are interconnected by an InfiniBand communications link, a high-performance link for inter-processor communication that facilitates many types of scientific research.

Information about applying for an academic grant to use Warhol is available here:

DISCOVER 09, Open House, January 29

DISCOVER 09, a day-long open house at PSC, January 29, will feature exhibits and demonstrations of high-performance computing in various fields of research, including weather, biomedicine, energy and product development.

"We want to show how the revolution of computational science represents an opportunity in many areas, including small business," said Cheryl Begandy, PSC manager of corporate programs, "that some people may not fully appreciate. We'll show how the computational approaches used in physics, chemistry and biology can also be applied to problems such as supply-chain management, financial modeling, customer data analysis, and new product development."

PSC will provide participants with information on how the tools of high-performance computing, such as modeling and simulation, visualization, data mining and others, produce new understanding in scientific disciplines as well as fostering innovation and a competitive edge in business and industry.